Why Community Matters During Grief (I Found Out at a Grocery Store)

I spent two hours in a grocery store.

Not because I needed anything on a list. I talked to the butcher about cuts of meat I had no intention of buying.

I lingered at a wine tasting; making conversation with strangers. I wandered the aisles having small exchanges with people about nothing important.

Two hours later, I walked to my car and sat there. Because I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.

Normal. 

I had no idea I was starving for human connection. And that realization cracked something open in me that changed the direction of everything I do now with grief and isolation.

The Isolation I Didn’t Know I Was Building

After my son Jeremy died, I moved back to Texas. I told myself I was regrouping. Finding myself again. Getting grounded.

The truth? I was retreating.

I wore a strong public face. I shared what I was comfortable with. I showed up where I needed to show up. And from the outside, it probably looked like I was holding it together.

But on the inside, I was building a wall I didn’t know I was building. Layer by layer. Day by day. Not because I was antisocial or incapable. Because grief does something to your interior that nobody warns you about.

Managing grief and isolation makes the world feel foreign. Conversations feel like performances. Social settings feel exhausting. And at some point, isolation stops feeling like a choice and starts feeling like the only thing that makes sense.

Then COVID hit. And the isolation I had been constructing internally became the world’s reality.

Everyone was quarantined. And I started slipping in ways I couldn’t explain.

It wasn’t because I couldn’t manage day to day. It wasn’t the weather or the restrictions. It was the fact that the internal isolation I had developed now had no counterbalance. 

When the days of overwhelm would show up out of nowhere — and they always did — I had nobody to turn to.

I couldn’t keep pouring it on my spouse. He was available. But grief is a never-ending story when you’re writing a book about it and living it again and again for months. There’s only so many times you can bring the same weight to the same person before guilt starts sitting next to the grief.

I was functioning on the outside and disappearing on the inside. And I didn’t fully realize it until a grocery store showed me what I’d been missing.

A Grocery Store Trip That Revealed the Truth

When stores began to open, I made a grocery store trip that revealed something I wasn’t expecting.

It was one of those big Texas stores where you can wander for an hour without trying. I wasn’t in a rush. And somewhere between the butcher counter and the wine aisle, something shifted.

I was connecting with real people. And it felt like oxygen.

Two hours later, sitting in my car, the weight of it hit me. I was starving for connection and didn’t know it.

Not deep, therapeutic, let-me-tell-you-about-my-grief connection. Just human presence.  The feeling that I existed in someone else’s moment, even briefly.

I hadn’t felt that in years. And I didn’t realize how much I needed it until it was right in front of me.

The Starbucks Line That Changed Everything

After that grocery store trip, I started getting out more. Coffee shops. Simple errands. Just to be around people.

And something unexpected started happening.

People started talking to me. Not small talk — real talk. Standing in line at Starbucks, a complete stranger would share something deeply personal. Pain they’d been carrying. Loss they hadn’t spoken about. Grief they’d never given words to.

People are desperate for connection. They’re carrying weight they have nowhere to put. And when they sense someone who might understand — even a stranger — it comes pouring out.

That confirmed what the grocery store started to show me: This isn’t just my problem– it’s an epidemic of isolation disguised as independence.

“Why Does My Counselor Push Me to Join a Support Group?”

I get this question often. And I understand the resistance.

A support group sounds like sitting in a circle, sharing your worst moments with strangers, and leaving feeling heavier than when you came. Nobody wants that.

But here’s what your counselor knows that you might not see yet:

Individual therapy gives you tools. But tools used in isolation have limits.

When you process grief alone — even with a therapist — you’re still the only voice interpreting your experience. You’re still inside your own loop. And when you go home, you’re still carrying it by yourself.

Community does something therapy can’t: it normalizes what you’re going through.

When you hear someone else describe the 3 AM anxiety, the brain fog, the emotional numbness — and you realize it’s not just you — something shifts. The shame loosens and the weight redistributes. You stop believing something is fundamentally wrong with you.

Your counselor isn’t pushing you toward a group because therapy isn’t working. They’re pushing you because healing in isolation has a ceiling. And community raises it.

That’s not theory– it’s what I lived. 

Why Isolation Compounds Grief

Most people don’t think about community until grief starts affecting how they function — not just how they feel.

Energy drops. Focus slips. Relationships strain. Life feels harder to navigate than it used to. And the natural instinct is to pull back. Conserve. Protect.

But pulling back is where it gets dangerous.

When grief happens in isolation, you start misinterpreting your own experience. You believe the lies your exhausted mind tells you. You carry weight that was never meant for one person. And without perspective from outside your own pain, grief doesn’t move through you. It settles in.

It becomes the furniture and the wallpaper. The temperature of every room you walk into.

And at some point, you stop noticing it — not because it’s gone, but because you’ve adjusted to living inside it. That’s not healing. That’s accommodation.

Community interrupts that accommodation.

It brings perspective back online, shortens the distance between what you’re experiencing and understanding what to do with it.  It reminds you there’s a world outside the walls you’ve built — and people standing in it who get it.

You carry more than grief in isolation. Community helps you set some of it down.

What Makes This Community Different

I didn’t build a support group. I built a community. There’s a difference.

Support groups often center around sharing pain. That has its place. But if that’s all you do, you create an environment that keeps people circling the wound without moving forward.

We don’t gather to stay stuck. Instead, we gather for relationships, support, and forward movement.

Here, you’re encouraged to identify the space you’re actually in — not the one you think you should be in. You don’t have to be polished, hopeful, or resolved to participate. You’re accepted as you are while clarity returns and next steps take shape.

There’s no pressure to share. No timeline to heal or to perform.

Just steady connection while life reorients.

Inside, you’ll find grounded conversation, practical perspective, and a reminder that sticks with you long after you close the app:

You’re not behind. You’re right on time.

Why I Built This

That day at Starbucks — watching strangers unload their pain on someone they’d never met — I made a decision.

I would gather people.

In this digital world where everyone’s connected to a screen and disconnected from each other — people are hungry for real connection. The ones dealing with grief? They’re numbing the pain just to survive. Scrolling. Binge-watching. Overworking. Anything to avoid sitting in the quiet with what they’re carrying.

And eventually, numbing stops working.

I started locally. Living rooms. Coffee shops. Small gatherings of people who just needed to be in a room with someone who understood.

Now it’s expanding online. Because isolation doesn’t care about zip codes. And neither should community.

Healing requires connection. Not performance or perfection. Just presence.

Join Us

If forward movement matters to you — even slightly — this is a good fit.

You don’t have to be ready or hopeful. You just have to be willing to not carry it alone.

See you there.

— Deborah